Reuters reports on the first private-corp lunar lander, who successfully touched down on the Moon and sent back useful data about conditions there. That’s the good news. The not-so-good news: the Odysseus lander managed to do this from a prone position. And in all likelihood, the lander is lying down on the job (which has been cut short) because execs decided to forego pre-flight tests as a cost-cutting measure:
An Intuitive Machines official said the loss of the range finders stemmed from the company’s decision to forgo a test firing of the laser system to save time and money during pre-flight checks of Odysseus at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
“There were certainly things we could’ve done to test it and actually fire it. They would’ve been very time-consuming and very costly,” Mike Hansen, the company’s head of navigation systems, told Reuters in an interview on Saturday. “So that was a risk as a company that we acknowledged and took that risk.”
On Friday Intuitive Machines had disclosed that the laser range finders – designed to feed altitude and forward-velocity readings to Odysseus’ autonomous navigation system – were inoperable because company engineers neglected to unlock the lasers’ safety switch before launch on Feb. 15. The safety lock, akin to a firearm’s safety switch, can only be disabled by hand.
The range-finder glitch, detected just hours before the final descent, forced flight controllers to send Odysseus into an extra lunar orbit while they improvised a work-around to avoid what could have been a catastrophic crash-landing.
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Intuitive Machines executives speculated that the forward speed of the spacecraft on landing, about twice as fast as expected, may have been a factor in stumbling. But it remained uncertain whether use of the original laser range finders might have made a difference.
In any case, Odysseus’ sideways posture substantially limited how much its solar panels were exposed to sunlight, necessary for recharging its batteries. Moreover, two of its antennae were pointed toward the ground, impeding communications with the lander, the company said on Friday.
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Despite its less-than-ideal touchdown, Odysseus became the first U.S. spacecraft to land on the moon since NASA’s last crewed Apollo mission to the lunar surface brought astronauts Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt there in 1972.
It was also the first lunar landing ever by a commercially manufactured and operated space vehicle, and the first under NASA’s Artemis program, which aims to return astronauts to Earth’s natural satellite this decade.